Your wrote: "Sorry, but that's completely wrong. The return function is for exiting a subroutine, not a loop. The first sentence of the last documentation starts (my emphasis):

If you look at my code, I put both loops within a subroutine, XXX. If the inner loop needs to abort the outer loop, a return statement is appropriate. Of course you have to refactor the code into a subroutine so that return from the inner loop aborts the outer loop.

If you don't do that then, you get to this stuff where inner loop has to set a flag that causes the outer loop to finish. Put both loops in a sub and just return from the inner loop when no more processing is necessary.

As far as return() goes, this would be more like I describe based upon your code:

use strict;
use warnings;

x($_)for (0..5); #sub x won't print any num >1
print "42\n";;


sub x
{
   my $num = shift;
   return if $num >1;
   print "$num\n";
}

__END__
Prints:
0
1
42
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This can be expanded to deal with 2 or more dimensions.